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The desert called so we pulled out the long boats and headed down the Baja way, first loading enough boats to take full advantage of both coasts, then cramming the truck full of every camping comfort it would take, right down to a hand-cranked margarita blender.

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Sean Morley knows a few things about going fast. He honed his forward stroke technique as a flatwater sprint racer on the British junior national team, but has made his biggest mark traveling far and fast in challenging conditions. He’s held speed records for crossing the Irish Sea, circumnavigating Vancouver Island, and paddling 4,500 miles around Great Britain and Ireland, solo.

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Last October I spent five days engulfed in the beauty of the Adirondack Mountains, paddling the lakes of the Saint Regis Canoe Area with a couple good friends. This was our first overnight paddling experience in the area; I came away with a few bits of knowledge to pass on to the next paddlers planning this perfect fall escape.

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The Maine Island Trail Association (MITA), which oversees a 375-mile waterway for small boaters from the New Hampshire border to Canada, just got a shot in the arm from L.L. Bean. The venerable outdoor gear and apparel maker, founded in 1912 by Leon Leonwood Bean, recently gave MITA and its Wild Islands Campaign a $100,000 grant to support its efforts to protect the trail system. It’s far from the first funds the company has awarded to the association. In 1987, L.L.Bean issued a grant to create the association, in partnership with the Maine Department of Conservation and the Island Institute. It was from this that both MITA and the Maine Island Trail — America’s first recreational water trail, an establishment founded on the notion that visitors could be entrusted with the islands’ care — were born. “For decades, L.L.Bean and the Maine Island Trail Association have shared the common goal of being good stewards of the environment,” says L.L.Bean chairman Shawn Gorman. “It’s in everyone’s best interest to ensure that we all have clean, pristine and accessible places to recreate in the outdoors. The Maine Island Trail Association is to be commended for their efforts to make the great outdoors even

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A month into their ambitious nine-month, 5,200-mile route, the six-man Rediscover North America crew highlights the first 27 days paddling up the Atchafalaya River, and crossing over to begin the long slog up the mighty Mississippi.

En Route: Deep in the Black Forest

You may remember Alexander Martin. Just over a year ago, the 25-year-old NOLS instructor from Connecticut completed the first, modern-day canoe expedition across America—a 4,300-mile solo journey from Portland to Portland, Oregon to Maine, that is. 2011 presents a new year for “Zand” and with it, a new continent to paddle across. Martin explains: “The Trans-Europa Canoe Expedition will follow the waterways of history across Europe; the route will take us west to east from the Atlantic Coast of France at Nantes, up the Loire River, through French canals to the Rhine River, over the mountains of the Black Forest to the source of the Danube River, and down the Danube to the Black Sea. The route, from Nantes to Istanbul, is more than 4,000 kilometers long and will take place between September and December, totally roughly 100 days.”Making a beeline for Budapest, hoping to make it before the harsh eastern European winter sets in, Martin sent in this correspondence giving us the lowdown through Kilometer 1100, Donau (Danube) River, Tuttlingen, Germany. Stay tuned to Canoekayak.com, where Martin will be recounting the epic journey in a series of exclusive En Route dispatches. CLICK HERE to see No. 1.

To Carry the Schwarzwald

The rain turns to sleet as we gain elevation; ahead and across the valley, clear accumulation shows the depravity of an early October snowstorm in Germany’s Black Forest. Sweat still rising from furrowed brows, we cross the snow line, coughing into stiff hands and stretching sore muscles. The towering Feldberg pierces the storm clouds above us, looming wintry white on white with a tracery of spruce. We get back into our positions, the canoe between us, and continue our portage.

In describing the Black Forest portage to a friend, the best I could do was to liken it towalking the route of a marathon with a 40-pound barrel on your back while pulling a canoe on wheels loaded with gear. Add in frequent snow and three significant mountain passes, and it gives a rough picture of what it was like.

In planning our route from France’s Atlantic Coast to Istanbul, the crux portage fell between the Rhine and the Danube—where the wooded mountains of southwestern Germany’s Schwarzwald region divide the drainage of western Europe and push the connecting shipping canal far to the north. To reach the headwaters of the Danube, the only choice was to carry 100 kilometers from the Rhine to Donaueschingen, Germany and the Donauquelle, the spring source that feeds the Danube.

The day we crossed the Rhine, the temperature dropped 30 degrees, finally ending our three-week high-pressure system of near-stifling late summer heat. By nightfall on our first day in Germany, the rain had begun to fall and the wind to blow. The next morning, we began to walk.

We are, no doubt, the first people to have portaged to Schonau. The small, cobble-paved hamlet is in the heart of the Black Forest—the Schwarzwald. My feet are tired. Tape sticks in abandoned white clumps, the skin bordering it is white and puffy, rapidly shrinking into a throb of no weight and effort now at an end. It is warm, inside; the air is still and the colors skewed to the domestic needs of weary travelers—at rest are the deep greens and burning yellow oranges of the day, the mist wafting into union with spruce smoke.

Our expedition is almost a month old—this is the first night John and I have spent indoors. We walk like old men, faces contorting to each jolt of cobbles or stairs. Tomorrow, we ascend the Feldberg, the tallest peak in the Black Forest. This is the cultural home of German identity, the place where the events of the Song of the Nibelungs took place. The secluded alpine valleys dotted with massive Teutonic longhouses trailing woodsmoke and surrounded by dense conifer forest evoke the mythic German past.

The forest is dark, the hills steep and stepping off the road, one is plunged into a realm where the population could run to dwarves, trolls, and a Teuton heroes named Seigfried just as easily as deer and sheep. This is where the Romans, looking north and east, decided the land and people with their wild love of freedom were ungovernable, and the imperial limes were established, there to hold for hundreds of years. We walk beautiful trails and along the margins of quiet mountain roads—all steep, all unforgiving.

The cart, which we affectionately named Hermann, made one-trip portaging possible, but he would not go up any real grade without a fight. For more than a short distance, John and I had to harness ourselves like oxen and lean into the traces to make any real headway.

Each day of the portage saw one significant mountain pass, but our second day, as we approached our halfway point, had us climbing the Feldbergpass. At 1,210 meters (about 4,000 feet), it was our highest elevation of the expedition, and our symbolic height of land—our true height of land lay 30 kilometers farther on, on less dramatic slope.

We paused by the ski lifts on the top of the pass to eat and rest. The snow was 4 inches deep already, and flurries came and went, alternating with teasing splashes of blue. Over the pass, blue came to dominate, and feeling came back into my hands.

One foot in front of the other. We arrived in Donaueschingen and portaged right to the Donauquelle, the mythic spring in the Furstenberg Palace gardens that is supposed to feed the birth of the Danube. While sitting by the street, a man ran out of a shop with his camera, exclaiming at our unusual burdens. After a few questions, he ran back inside and returned with medallions emblazoned on one side with the Spring, and the other, with St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers.

In the morning, we paddled out of Donaueschingen, even here there is a stone kilometer marker: It reads 2,776. Some of our hardest kilometers are behind us, but there are still many more to go.